solo.ckpool.org vs Public Pool, and the other solo pools compared

solo.ckpool.org vs Public Pool, head to head

This is the comparison people search for most often, and it is a fair fight between the two best-known true-solo pools — so here it is on its own, before we say anything about ourselves.

Short version: Public Pool if you are in or near the US and want 0% with TLS; solo.ckpool.org if you are far from it and would rather pay 2% than throw work away to latency. Neither choice changes your odds of a block — nothing does except your hashrate.

• Fee — Public Pool takes 0%; solo.ckpool.org takes 2% of the block reward. On a block at today's subsidy that difference is real money.
• Encryption — Public Pool offers TLS on :4333. solo.ckpool.org does not, so your stratum traffic is in the clear.
• Reach — solo.ckpool.org runs US, EU, Singapore and Australia nodes; Public Pool is a single US host. A ckpool latency figure means nothing until you name the door: from one Jakarta line on 2026-09-10, sgsolo.ckpool.org (Singapore) measured ~18 ms and solo.ckpool.org (US) ~224 ms, against Public Pool's single US host at ~250 ms (June 2026; 263 ms on 2026-08-21). Latency is the one place the fee difference can be outweighed — stale work is lost work.
• Track record — solo.ckpool.org has found a great many blocks over many years and is the reference implementation most solo pools are built on. Public Pool is GPLv3, self-hostable, and is the pool most Bitaxes ship pointed at.
• Both are genuine per-miner solo with no account and no KYC, and both are open source.

How SoloLuck compares

Solo-mining odds are identical on every pool — no pool can improve them, no matter where you point your miner. So choose on the things that actually differ: fee, latency to your region, encryption, and features. Here is an honest side-by-side — SoloLuck and Public Pool are both 0% fee, so choose on region, latency, encryption and features, not price.

One row below is worth reading twice. SoloLuck's Bitcoin mining runs in one pool, in Jakarta; Singapore is a forwarder into it, not a pool of its own. The latency row below is a single measured line in Indonesia — for a figure that means something on your connection, the Ping Race times the pool and the Singapore door from your own browser, alongside the competitors a browser can reach, all by the same method.

Size, not features: the Solo Mining Census reads each of these pools, and every other Bitcoin solo pool that publishes its numbers, once an hour from the pool's own public endpoint. We run one of these pools.

Where SoloLuck stands out: a short hop for miners near any of the Bitcoin pools (the latency row above is one measured line — run your own on Ping), encrypted TLS stratum, a CPU-friendly Nano tier (plus a one-click Windows app), live per-address stats. Where others win: Public Pool is fully open-source and self-hostable, AtlasPool runs global multi-region anycast, and Braiins Solo is run by the team behind the world's first mining pool and has a public record of found solo blocks — which SoloLuck, being new, does not. On all of them the block reward is paid on-chain straight to your address.

One thing the table settles outright, though: SoloLuck is the only pool on it that will take a CPU or a NerdMiner at 0% — minimum share difficulty 1 on the Nano port, plus a one-click Windows miner. Public Pool matches us on fee and on TLS and beats us on being fully open source; it simply advertises no low-difficulty tier. AtlasPool’s floor is about 400 GH/s, which a CPU cannot reach. Check it on the two rows above — we are the only ✓ in either. None of this changes your odds: only hashrate does, and we still have not found a block.

So which should you pick?

• You want the shortest hop from your own line → measure it first and point at whichever pool wins, SoloLuck included (see Ping for what that does and does not mean). SoloLuck answers in Jakarta, and the race times it and its Singapore door.
• You mine on a CPU or small Bitaxe → SoloLuck's Nano tier (min diff 1) and Windows app are built for you.
• You want fully open-source, self-hostable software → Public Pool (GPLv3; its 0% fee is the same 0% as SoloLuck).
• You want global multi-region anycast → AtlasPool (nine endpoints across six continents, announced from 100+ points of presence; atlaspool.io, 2026-09-10).
• You want an operator with a long track record and blocks already found → Braiins Solo (0.5%, no registration, from the team behind the first-ever Bitcoin pool). It has no TLS, and from Indonesia it measured ~186 ms against our single-digit hop.
• You mine on an ESP32 NerdMiner and want the pool built around them → NerdMiner Pool (0%) — or our Nano tier, which serves the same boards with TLS, in Jakarta.
• You solo-mine coins besides Bitcoin → SoloPool.org — 2% on Bitcoin (raised from 1.5% on 2026-09-01), and solo pools for Bitcoin Cash, merged Litecoin+Dogecoin, DigiByte and more, so one operator covers the chains you rotate hardware between. It does not publish where its servers run, so measure before you commit.
• You want Stratum V2 → SoloFury (1%; nine regions, including Singapore and Tokyo). SoloLuck is Stratum V1 only.
• You would rather earn something while you wait → a solo-hybrid pool, not us — see below.

⚡ Ping Race — measure your own latency to each pool →

Solo-hybrid pools — a different deal we do not offer

The table above is true solo: you win a whole block or you win nothing. A second category has grown up around home miners, and it is worth knowing about because for some people it is simply the better choice.

• Parasite Pool — the block finder takes a guaranteed 1 BTC, and the rest of the reward plus transaction fees is shared proportionally among everyone mining. You still get a real jackpot, but a smaller one, and everyone else gets paid something for the round.
• SoloPool.com — a different operator from SoloPool.org in the table above, despite the name — you pick your own split: the stratum password is a number from 0 to 100 setting what share of your work goes solo versus into a proportional pool. A 2% dev fee comes off every block, and payouts go straight to your address in the block's coinbase, so it stays non-custodial.

OCEAN (mine.ocean.xyz:3334) appears in almost every Bitaxe pool guide next to the solo pools, so it belongs here for clarity: it is a pooled, non-custodial pool — rewards are split among all its miners by its TIDES scheme (2% fee, 1% for miners running their own DATUM node) and paid to your own address. Steady small payouts, no whole-block ticket: a good choice for exactly that, and not a solo pool. D-Central's OCEAN guide explains the model well.

The honest version: if steady small payouts matter more to you than a whole-block lottery ticket, a hybrid is a better fit than SoloLuck and you should use one. We are pure solo on purpose — every share here is a ticket on the entire reward, and nothing else. Verify any pool's payout model on its own site before pointing hardware at it.

Whatever you choose, keep your own BTC address as the username — that is what makes it true solo. See /status for our live hashrate and block count, and /verify for how to check every claim yourself.

Independent tracking: SoloLuck's live hashrate, miner count and 0% fee are listed on miningpoolstats.stream, the long-running pool directory — a third-party view you can cross-check against our own /status.

Two more true-solo pools worth knowing

Both are pure solo like the table above — the finder keeps the block, paid to their own address — and neither shows a block of its own yet, same as us. Facts from their own sites, read 2026-08-29.

• NerdMiner Pool (pool.nerdminer.io:3333) — 0% fee, a community project built around ESP32 NerdMiners and Bitaxes since 2023; difficulty auto-adjusts down to the tiniest boards, and it states “850+ miners connected”. The pool closest to SoloLuck in spirit. Our Nano tier (:3335, minimum difficulty 1) serves the same devices, with TLS available. Is it answering right now?
• SoloFury (btc.solofury.com:6060, TLS :16060, Stratum V2 on its regional hosts) — 1% fee, a ckpool fork launched publicly in January 2026 with stratum servers in nine regions including Singapore and Tokyo, no minimum hashrate, and BCH and eCash pools alongside BTC.